“Every life has its potentiality of greatness”
16 July 1848
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: To adore, to understand, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: there is my law my duty, my happiness, my heaven. Let come what come will — even death. Only be at peace with self, live in the presence of God, in communion with Him, and leave the guidance of existence to those universal powers against whom thou canst do nothing! If death gives me time, so much the better. If its summons is near, so much the better still; if a half-death overtake me, still so much the better, for so the path of success is closed to me only that I may find opening before me the path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation. Every life has its potentiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Henri-Frédéric Amiel 50
Swiss philosopher and poet 1821–1881Related quotes
“The bureaucratic method of building an integrated Europe has exhausted its potential.”
"Can Europe Work? A Plan to Rescue the Union" in Foreign Affairs (September/October 1996)
“Every stage of life has its troubles, and no man is content with his own age.”
Omne aevum curae; cunctis sua displicet aetas.
Eclogae 2, line 10; translation from Hugh Gerard Evelyn White Ausonius ([1919-21] 1951) vol. 1, p. 165.
As quoted in "Dalai Lama urges students to shape world" in The Seattle Times (15 May 2001) http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010515&slug=dalai15m0.
Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855), The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race (1854)
Context: No science has been reached, no thought generated, no truth discovered, which has not from all time existed potentially in every human mind. The belief in the progress of the race does not, therefore, spring from the supposed possibility of his acquiring new faculties, or coming into the possession of a new nature.
Still less does truth vary. They speak falsely who say that truth is the daughter of time; it is the child of eternity, and as old as the Divine mind. The perception of it takes place in the order of time; truth itself knows nothing of the succession of ages. Neither does morality need to perfect itself; it is what it always has been, and always will be. Its distinctions are older than the sea or the dry land, than the earth or the sun. The relation of good to evil is from the beginning, and is unalterable.
Speeches, 20th Party Anniversary Address
On The Washington Journal of C-SPAN https://www.c-span.org/video/?124979-1/the-trek-beginning (11 June 1999)
1990s, 1999
